REMARKS ON OTHER ARTISTS
For the past twenty years Guy Boutin has been intensely involve in drawings as a primary visual investigation. His method of working is to use a brush with acrylic paint directly and spontaneously on paper. The size of his work spans from small to huge mural .As a result Mr. Boutin has developed a unique and recognizable style that has been consciously and deliberately appropriated by many artists in Quebec.
Every time Guy Boutin works he draws faces and these faces are the vehicles of his narratives. One of his narratives is based on relationships like the post-modern narrative of the artist and his model.
Guy Boutin does not decorate he tells stories. He narrates the tragedy and excitements that he sees around himself in the present tense. This approach produces a strong, personal and convincing body of work that helps us come to terms with relationship, both consensual and none consensual. A relationship between people that is violent and often distressing, that we constantly witness everyday.
Mr. Boutin has studied art in the early 80`s at UQAM, University du Quebec ŕ Montreal. Right from the beginning of his career, he developed a unique approach to drawings that has been very influential in the graphical narratives in Quebec visual culture, and that has swept the province since the demise of the Hard Edge base Art of the sixty and early seventies.
The best way to understand his art is to notice the presence of the random marks and stains as a dominating visual vocabulary. The sense of spontaneity and control that we feel keeps everything urgent and new.
For the last thirty five years Mark Prent has cultivated and developed unique post-modern sculptural installations that redefines the notion of strong visuals through outstanding technical innovations and seriously charged political multi layer art works. He confronted us relentlessly from the seventies. Instead of resolving the challenges that his work presents us with, we avoided and censored his place in Canadian visual history by cultivating a safe environment for weak and design based often-symbolic art. There is very little reference to the pioneers of strong engaging Canadian political and challenging art today. This we did by weakening serious evaluative processes and declaring all opinions subjective and suspect. To confront this pathetic state of affair I have asked Mark to show in an artist run center as a celebration of the research based agenda of political strong Canadian visual culture that I and a small group of artists are involved with. I am also responding to the persistent questions that I have heard over and over across Canada “ what has happened to Mark” .It became obvious that we must come face to face with the unresolved problem in visual culture in order to celebrate our multicultural presence. For this reason I see the promotions and discussions of difficult but challenging even shocking narrative-based politically charged strong art as the major art forms that contributes to our understanding of our generation and our disturbing times